Many companies and businesses utilize multiple heterogeneous systems for storing, generating, and manipulating information. The companies may have these different systems because the information needs to be manipulated in different ways. For example, one user may need the information in a table or spreadsheet format, another user may need a subset of this information in a file format, while yet another user may have provided the source of that information in a database format. Furthermore, in order to meaningfully apply the varieties of the information to their respective needs, the users may need different pieces of the information or may need to perform transformations on given information to suit their needs.
Additionally, the format of the information or corresponding data for provision into a system may be unique to the particular system. For example, one user may only need a title corresponding to the information and the information itself, while another user may need the information itself, a corresponding description of the information, and the date the information was generated. Once the information has been input to a particular system, the system may change the format of the information and may add additional data. Therefore, the companies have different systems to facilitate the manipulation and generation of information needed by different users for different purposes.
However, once the information has been generated, other users may need or use this information. Thus, companies and businesses have systems in which information from one system can be shared across other systems, but oftentimes it is difficult to identify how or what information is available for sharing, who has accessed information that resulted from transformations to an original source, and the like. The sharing of information reduces the amount of time that has to be spent by employees generating and populating information into a system. For example, if one user has generated tables, in one system, containing information needed by another user of a second system, the user of the second system can access the information without having to generate the information. However, the second user may need to transform the information to suit the needs at hand. Additionally, the user may not have access to the system on which the information was originally stored or generated or may not be able to use the information in its original form, and the user who provided the information may wish to know that others are using the information that he/she provided.